by Cat Marnell
“She’s not available right now,” I’d say politely. Mom was allowed to not take calls during tennis. My dad always had to.
Ten minutes later . . .
“Marnell residence.”
“Answering service,” the bored-sounding lady would say. “Is Dr. Marnell there?” I was already out the door in bare feet with the cordless. It would take a few minutes to get to the court. My parents would be playing with another couple—doubles.
“GODDAMMIT, STACE,” my dad would be roaring. He’d be wearing white Izod shorts and those wraparound sports glasses. “GO TO THE NET!”
“I’m trying!” my mom would wail. Mom would be in an Asics tennis dress and, underneath, those horrible underpants that you tuck balls into. Tennis panties, they’re called. Ugh. I can still see her . . . reaching into her skirt and pulling out a ball. This disturbing visual has been imprinted irrevocably on my mind.
“Dad,” I’d interrupt.
He’d set down his Wilson racket and wipe the sweat off his palms and take the phone.
“This is Dr. Marnell.” The other couple would stand there. Then: “Give him [such and such] milligrams of Zyprexa every four hours.” And I’d take the phone back.
“Five–love,” someone would say. Then the thwack of the tennis ball. Thwack. Thwack. Thwack.
My mom would be weepy for approximately four hours on the days my dad shouted at her on the court. Then she’d turn to ice.
Ah. “Dysfunctional” families. If you are from one as well, I don’t have to explain. If you aren’t, well—think of the most toxic relationship you’ve ever been in. You know, the one where you and your partner were both your worst selves: yelling, smashing things, not speaking for days, making nasty comments, locking yourselves in bathrooms. Then imagine it was with your father, mother, older sister, and little brother instead of your ex. Then imagine that you couldn’t leave that relationship for fifteen years! That was my childhood. Sure, it could have been worse—but, to quote Keith Richards on the end of his relationship with Anita Pallenberg: “It could have been better, baby.”
We all played a part, but I didn’t understand all that, so I blamed everything on my dad. He was such a good person, but his temper was B-A-N-A-N-A-S. You never knew when things were gonna pop off—though “at the dining room table” was a pretty good guess. Family dinner was at eight o’clock sharp, in the dining room, seven nights per week. No exceptions. More often than not, it ended disastrously.
“IF YOU THROW UP, YOU HAVE TO EAT IT,” my dad roared one night while I cried and choked down the bite of fish on my plate. I was seven and a picky, dramatic eater. “GODDAMMIT!”
“AUUUUGH!” I moaned, gagging.
“EAT IT!” my dad screamed.
“No one can make you feel anything you don’t want to feel,” my mother told me once, a complete delusion.
He never got physical, but it sure got scary. To this day, I completely shut down when someone is yelling.
“Girls!” my mom screamed another night. We had just sat down to our filet mignon and broccoli when my dad leapt from his chair. “CALL THE POLICE!” My sister and I left our baby brother at the table. We ran all the way through the long house to my parents’ suite and locked the door. My sister dialed 9-1-1.
“My mom just told us to call you!” Emily told the operator. “We’re at 7800 Kachina Lane!”
We hung up with the cops and ran back through the house to see what was happening. My dad was shouting up a storm. The front door was wide open, and he didn’t even care. That’s when I knew it was really serious.
“THIS IS IT!” he was yelling. “I’M OUT. GODDAMMIT. I’M OUT.” He whistled for the dog.
“He’s taking Ben!” I cried.
“Shh,” Emily said. My dad got in his car and drove away.
My mom would hardly let the cops in when they rang the doorbell.
“It was a misunderstanding,” she said. “Everything’s fine.” The next night my dad was back for family dinner, so I guess it was.
“Don’t say anything bad about your father,” my mom would sigh when I came to her—which wasn’t too often. She’d be sitting in her bedroom, watching L.A. Law. “Can you rub my arm?” Tennis elbow.
* * *
I had two places to escape to when things were bad at my house. The first was my Mimi’s. She lived just a stone’s throw from our glass house, in the guest cottage. I went over there whenever I needed to. My grandmother was my favorite person in the whole world. She was from a very old Virginia family, and her own cousin, a man named Beverly, was in love with her. She had a southern accent and called me “sugah” and “dah-lin’. ”
Her living room was full of orchids and tiny sterling silver spoons and teensy demitasse cups and saucers, and peacock feathers and mother-of-pearl binoculars and juno volupta seashells. You could pick up her great-granddaddy’s fox-hunting horn and HONK! into it if you so desired. And all of this was just scattered about. Her shiny black baby grand Steinway piano was in the corner. She’d play it and trill in her old-timey singing voice.
“Fox went out on a chilly night . . .”
“Prayed for the moon to give him light . . . ” I’d chime in.
Mimi kept costume jewelry under her bed in plastic ice trays. All the dangly earrings were clip-on, so you could wear them even if you were only five. The stuff in her closet was even better: fake braids, turbans, glamorous hand-carved walking sticks, silk kimonos, and real minks with googly glass eyes to throw over your shoulder when you played Cruella Marnell.
At sunset, Mimi would drive me into Potomac to watch the horses at Avenel Farm. Sometimes we’d feed them carrot sticks. Then it would be time for me to go home. Mimi never ate dinner with us in the glass dining room. My dad didn’t like it.
The other place I could always escape to was my bedroom. It was in the basement—very far from my parents’ room, and from my brother’s and sister’s. The nanny’s bedroom was next to mine, so I wasn’t totally alone. Still, I’d been afraid to sleep down there when we first moved to Kachina—I was four—but there wasn’t room for me upstairs with everyone else.
“You’re the bravest,” my mom had told me. True dat.
The lower level was huge—and a mess. Biblical floods! Pipes in the laundry room would burst in the middle of the night and water would gush from the ceiling; my dad would pull me out of bed at one in the morning and make me hold a bucket. Blame Frank Lloyd Wright’s apprentice, I guess. The hallway stank of mold and the carpet was always wet and squishy; your socks would get soaked through. I was always leaping over puddles to get to my bedroom. And there were so many bugs downstairs: little ones with pinchers—my sister and I called them tweedlebugs—and daddy longlegs that would creep right up on your comforter while you were snuggled under the covers with a chapter book. Eventually I got bunk beds—just so I could sleep up high.
But you know what’s funny? The older I got, the more I liked living in that gnarly basement. It was like my own world! No one even monitored me. My dad would come say good night and switch off my light, but ten minutes later I’d just turn it on again and read Sweet Valley High as long as I wanted. When I was in the fifth grade, I watched a Saturday night Saved by the Bell marathon on TBS in the playroom until dawn—my first all-nighter. Then slept until one in the afternoon on a Sunday, and no one even noticed! It was the craziest thing I’d ever done. I had lice for months and didn’t tell my mom; I picked the bugs off my head in the basement. Then I’d pick all the fleas off Benny the Bear (I don’t know where he got them, but there were so many). I didn’t even have to brush my teeth! Or take baths or comb my hair. I snuck junk food downstairs and ate in bed; I kept my room like a swamp, but no one cared. No one ever bothered me. Seriously, I could get away with murder down there! And no one ever knew.
Chapter Two
MIDDLE SCHOOL TIME! UGH, THE worst. Okay, so I turned twelve in Septe
mber 1994. Being a teenybopper tween in this era was pret-ty dark. The cutest rock star, Kurt Cobain, shot himself in the head, and my friends and I were wildly interested in this. How could we not be? Murdering your life had officially gone pop! Courtney Love was reading Kurt’s suicide note over a loudspeaker on MTV. “I HATE MYSELF AND I WANT TO DIE” posters were stocked alongside the usual Salt-N-Pepa and Madonna at Sam Goody at the mall. I bought one! Kurt was wearing green Converse One Star sneakers in the suicide photos, so I bought green Converse One Stars—and so did my friend Lauren. And then so did my friend Samara! That sort of thing. Kurt was dead, yes, but he was still dreamy: we all agreed on this. His blue eyes were just so pretty. And his chin-length hair on Nirvana: Unplugged? Omigod.
Zack and Kelly came down from my walls in the Kachina basement (Mark-Paul Gosselaar was starting to look all ’roided out, anyway—it was The College Years) and Kurt and Courtney went up. Not that I was home much. My squad and I convened nearly every day after school in my new best friend Shabd’s hot-pink bedroom, so painted after the feathers on the cover of the Garbage album she always had on repeat. We’d flip through Sassy and YM magazines and watch 120 Minutes and eat junk food from 7-Eleven. I was a big fan of Utz Salt‘n Vinegar potato chips and drastically less so of doing my homework. (Is this what ADHD is? I’ll never know!)
All we talked about were rock stars, rock stars, rock stars: it was, after all, what Rolling Stone has since called “Mainstream Alternative’s Greatest Year.” Lauren loved Dave Grohl and Beck; Shabd squealed about Michael Stipe, Billy Corgan, and Shannon Hoon. Samara got hot for Anthony Kiedis and Eddie Vedder; Sarah was into Perry Farrell and Scott Weiland. And me? I was all Courtney Love, all of the time. I loved her platinum hair; I loved her baby-doll clothes; I loved her music. I bought every magazine she was in—from Sassy (I had the Kurt and Courtney cover on my wall) to Spin to Rolling Stone. I read the profiles until I’d memorized them. She stimulated my brain. Every Courtney interview taught me thirty new things. She was so gossipy and funny—glamorous and a feminist! (I was getting into feminism, too—riot grrl and all that.) And her mother was a weirdo psychotherapist, too.
Shabd had been raised in some sort of . . . “community,” let’s say. Whatever it was, her family wasn’t in it anymore. Her mom had hair down to her waist and a sort of . . . New Age accent. The whole family was vegetarian, and they lived in a tiny house full of crystals and health food and . . . I don’t know. Driftwood! (Maybe not driftwood.) Anyway. I was so jealous of my friend. Her parents let her do anything she wanted to do—and Shabd wanted to do crazy things, like bleach her hair platinum and then dye Manic Panic stripes into it like a rainbow. I wasn’t even allowed to wear black eyeliner. I did anyway, but still.
Shabd’s dad had a long, brown beard and barely spoke. He took us to concerts! We were obsessed; we scoured the City Paper every week. The best shows were at a tiny DC club called the Black Cat. Shabd’s dad would stand in the back while we maneuvered to the stage: “Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me, please.” Mad squeaky. Shabd was literally four-eight and I was five feet, so people were nice. Well, until the mosh pit started—but we didn’t mind a little violence. The rougher things got, the more likely it was that bouncers would lift us up and out of there and plunk us down on the stage by the speakers and the amps. That’s how I saw L7—so close up that I thought a guitar neck might bash me in the face!
God, I just loved the feeling of being in that club! And Shabd and I knew a secret about the Black Cat: the bands had to exit through the front to get outside to their tour buses. So if you waited around in the club after the show—while the bartenders counted the money and the cleaning crews swept the floors—you could meet the rock stars! Normal adult fans didn’t get to just linger about, but tweens are very charming, you know. Work it while you can, kids.
We met so many people: Seven Year Bitch, Tripping Daisy, Collective Soul, the Presidents of the United States of America. Radiohead! Thom (we called him “Thom-with-an-H”) was cute, but it was the guitarist Jonny Greenwood we were really hot for. He was skinny and pale, with brown hair hanging in his eyes, long fingers, and terrible posture. We sat onstage and screamed every time he looked at us, which wasn’t too often (I think he was afraid). Then, after the show . . .
“WE LOVE YOU!” we screamed in unison, as we generally did. “CAN YOU SIGN OUR POSTERS? BWAHHHH!” They were very sweet. Shabd and I were still crying when we left the Black Cat.
If you’re young, you must go to as many shows as you can! You’ll never regret it. My friends and I saw the Lords of Acid (“Crablouse”), R.E.M. on their Monster tour, Smashing Pumpkins, Silverchair, the Cranberries on the Mall in DC. We cut school for that one and it turned into a riot—no, seriously! Shabd and I got jostled around until a nice cop pulled us out and drove us back to Bethesda in his squad car. We held hands and giggled in the backseat.
But my biggest rock-star day was at the HFStival, when I was thirteen. Anyone who was anyone in 1995 was playing this show. My friends and I squished to the front as usual—but this was RFK Stadium, not a club. The guys thrashing around by the stage were mental; we were holding on to the guardrail for our lives. Screaming for each other. Garbage was onstage; it was ninety trillion degrees, and I hadn’t been drinking water or anything, duh, because I was stuck in front of this stupid mosh pit. The bar was pressing so hard into my stomach that I finally blacked out.
Bouncers snatched me up and carried me to the infirmary backstage. The medics were wearing GERMS T-shirts—a nod to onetime Nirvana guitarist Pat Smear, who was playing the festival with his new band, the Foo Fighters. As a GERM checked me out, I peeked over his shoulder. Weren’t those . . . the Everclear dudes? Walking right by. That’s when I realized the GERMS station was set up between the dressing rooms and the main stage . . .
“You’re good to go,” the GERM told me.
“Can I rest here for a little while?” I said sweetly. I was wearing Shabd’s minuscule X-Girl hot pants, Urban Decay nail polish, ice-blue Hard Candy glittery eyeliner, and a Bikini Kill “YEAH YEAH YEAH YEAH” T-shirt from Smash! in Georgetown. “I still don’t feel good.”
“Sure,” the medic said. “Don’t leave this cot, okay?” I nodded. And that’s what I did: stayed put, and observed the celebrities from a respectful distance.
“GWENNNN!” Just kidding. The second I saw Gwen Stefani, I levitated—seriously—and flew directly into her arms. No Doubt had just made it big with Tragic Kingdom. She was wearing a crop top and approximately fifty pounds of makeup (swag). “I LOVE YOU! I LOVE YOU!”
“Aw . . . ” She hugged me back. I was wailing. Weeping! Clinging to that bitch like a barnacle. “I love you, too!” Then her belly chain got caught on my necklace. Do you die?!
I accosted them all: Shirley Manson (who said she remembered me), the Presidents of the United States of America (who also said they remembered me), Jewel, the Lush chicks, the cuties from Goldfinger. I didn’t pounce on the Gin Blossoms because . . . they were the Gin Blossoms.
Everyone was nice, but Pat Smear was the best. After I’d attacked him like a bold disturbed mistress—as they say on MediaTakeOut.com—he looped a backstage pass around my neck and took me to get a vegetarian lunch at craft services! Then he brought me into the Foo Fighters’ dressing room to meet Dave Grohl. The three of us—you know, me and basically half of Nirvana—sat and talked for almost an hour! Dave told me he liked my shirt!
Then! Pat took me to the side of the stage to watch No Doubt’s set. I remember looking out at the stadium crowd during “Just a Girl” and thinking . . . well, my first thought was, Shabd is going to hate me. (I was right: she didn’t talk to me for two months.) My second thought was, This is the happiest day of my life.
* * *
I loved my new alterna-groupie identity, but my father was not feeling me. He was ultraconservative—and definitely not down with rock ’n’ roll. In the seventies, he took my mom to a Ro
lling Stones concert at the Superdome in New Orleans, and everyone kept asking him where the bathrooms were—because he was the only guy in the place wearing a tie! And he’d never taken a drug, not even marijuana. He was from a hard-core GOP family (so I was, too): his mother had been president of Republican Women of Pennsylvania. My dad was always doing weird things like declaring the Washington Post to be too liberal (it’s not that liberal) and canceling our subscription, or encouraging me to apply for an internship at the Heritage Foundation.
“If you’re not a liberal when you’re twenty, you have no heart,” my dad used to quote Winston Churchill in the car after my soccer games. “If you’re not a conservative at forty, you have no head.” Then he’d crank up the Vivaldi.
My dad barely knew who the Cobains were, of course, but he hated my favorite couple almost as much as he hated Bill and Hillary Clinton, the other most famous couple of the nineties. He’d come down to my basement lair just to tear their pictures from the wall.
“Why does he have to be so mean?” I sobbed to my mother after one such . . . desecration. I mean, I understood his problem with Kurt—my dad treated suicidal people every day—but Courtney? She was the best! And my dad had just torn their wedding photo to bits (he’d noticed that Kurt was wearing a dress).
“Your father is just worried about you,” my mom said.
Fair enough. My grades throughout this time were bad. Really, really bad. Unacceptable. Dismal. Gnarly. Atrocious. The pits! I’d been a straight-A student in elementary school—whatever that means to anyone—but as soon as I hit puberty . . . everything went downhill. Everyone treated this “change” like it was some huge mystery; my mom read Reviving Ophelia and all that. Can hormones make you stupid? Because that’s what I think happened.
Also . . . you know what? Some people just aren’t meant for the grind. I was in one of those huge public middle schools, taking seven different classes a day. I couldn’t keep up. I couldn’t even remember my locker combination! So I started shutting down—figuratively and literally, during classes. I’d been fully alert at ten years old; then I turned eleven and suddenly I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I’d fall asleep right there at my desk. And not because I wasn’t totally well rested; I totally was! It was so weird. And in the next class, I’d nod off again, at a different desk.